Macbeth

Intended as a tribute to King James I, Macbeth may have been first performed before the royal family at Hampton Court, a palace twelve miles from the center of London. King James, who already wore the crown of Scotland when he ascended the throne of England, would have found Macbeth especially intriguing. The play is set in Scotland in the eleventh century. This is when the Jame's family, the Stuarts, first came to the Scottish throne. One of the strongest and most virtuous characters in the play, Banquo is said to have been the father of the first of the Stuart kings.
             Shakespeare originated the basic plot for Macbeth from an account of eleventh century Scottish history in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. In writing his play, Shakespeare altered and expanded Holinshed's history, reshaped the personalities, and invented some new characters. .
             The main character in Macbeth, as in other Elizabethan (and Greek) tragedies, is a tragic hero, a person of high rank and personal quality. Because of a fatal weakness, a tragic flaw, the hero becomes involved in a series of events that lead to his eventual downfall and destruction.
             At the beginning of Shakespeare's play, the hero Macbeth is pictured as courageous, trustworthy, and loyal. By the end of the play, his ambition has driven him to commit a series of horrendous acts that, once begun, he is powerless to stop. While the audience is repelled by Macbeth's actions, it also pities him, understanding Macbeth's anguish and knowing how easy it is to fall prey to uncontrolled ambition or greed.
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             Macbeth opens with three withes entering the scene. They are amist of thunderstorms and rain. They give him three prophesies. The first is that he will become the Thane of Cawdor, the second is the Thane of Glamis, which he already was titled as, and the third was stated by the witches as: "he shalt be King hereafter-.